Angelinos! FUNKY FORREST Playing Friday June 5th at Midnight!

Hi Blog,

Katsuhito Ishii's gigantically weird film ナイスの森 (aka FUNKY FORREST) will be playing this Friday, June 5th, at midnight at the Silent Movie theater.

What's to say about the film? Well, it features color coordinated girls DJ-ing gnarled and moss covered trees; prolapsed anuses built into TV-sets; men dressed up as fuzzy animals with, erm... tails coming out of their crotches... Oh and it features Tadanobu Asasno and a fat, chocolate bar eating Caucasian kid as the Guitar Brothers. I dunno... You all should just go and see it. This is one film that is better on the big screen with a crowd (that is potentially high/drunk).

Here's what the Subway Cinema folks wrote about the film when they screened it in NYC back in 2006:

Not since David Lynch slunk onto the scene with ERASERHEAD has a more singular vision broken out of one man's skull and run riot across the silver screen seducing audiences with its sugary strangeness. But FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT is a hermetically sealed, fifth dimensional artifact from Planet Japan beaming out of our eyes and into our universe. The only movie with an A side and a B side this is a full-on invasion of third-dimensional Earthling brains by a twelfth dimensional alien consciousness.

From the director and cast who brought you last year's Audience Award Winner THE TASTE OF TEA, this flick invites you to drink the Kool Aid, take the red pill, show us your dancing and break the chains of reason and logic that bind our brains. Director Katsuhito Ishii (who directed the animation in KILL BILL VOL 1) and a crew of ace comedic actors (including Tadanobu Asano as the laconic Guitar Brother) have made a movie featuring TV's made of giant buttholes, powered by belly button energy and capable of producing miniature sushi chefs. Not everyone can master this frequency. As the Shorty Trio says, "Some days people laugh, some days…they don't." With its shoe obsession, fixation on Snickers bars, and its firm belief that the secrets of the universe can be unlocked by dancing, FUNKY FOREST: THE FIRST CONTACT strips everyday life of meaning, turns mundane tasks into bizarre rituals, and makes surrealist hay out of our most sacred ideals. This is not a movie. This is an invitation to join a dancing army of holy fools and travel through time and space to the super-elastic, thoroughly fantastic Planet of Piko Riko." (Link)

Other stuff I've written about Ishii.

USATAKU NO HANASHI (aka ウサタクの話)

My oh my...

So, mad-man Ishii Katsuhito, the totally insane director of the cinematic acid tabs CHA NO AJI (aka. TASTE OF TEA) and NAISU NO MORI (aka. FUNKY FOREST) has apparently been hired by Fujitsu ("The Possibilities are Infinite"®) to do some totally off the wall short films in support of their new laptop. The laptop barely features in the shorts. But who cares? It's a vector for us to all get a nice Ishii Katsuhito fix (which is never a bad thing).



Here's the rundown of what it's all about:

Some short dude named Takuya, who for no discernible (or, apparently, particularly important reason) turns into a rabbit one night. So, his panicked [girl]friend does what any caring soul would do: desperately tries to fix what ails him. However, this has nothing to do with the logical solution to the problem: trying to turn him back in to a normal person. But instead takes the form of two problems solved over three (technically four) short videos:

1) He won't move at all and so he has to be danced back into mobility.
2) He won't laugh so he has to be 'manzai'd' back into good humor.
3) And when this proves impossible, the master of all comedians must swoop in and tell a shaggy dog story about a weird incident that happened to his son.

I know, I know... What the f**k? But that's exactly why we love Katsuhito Ishii, because we never can tell what will happen next.

Oh, and even if you don't speak Japanese you'll still get a kick out of it.

link